Microsoft to acquire GitHub

Janis Cole

Apparently, GitHub is willing to carry out an agreement, if certain conditions are met, of which one is to remain independent and continue with the same dynamic that they are developing from the beginning, say sources of Business Insider. The deal would be quite favorable for Microsoft, as the software giant has been actively seeking developers.

GitHub is described as the world's leading software development platform, and it now served over 28 million developers worldwide.

As of March 2018, GitHub listed 28 million developers on its online community and hosted 85 million code repositories, making it the biggest host of source code in the world.

To his point: It didn't take long after Nadella took the reigns in 2014 for him to declare that "Microsoft loves Linux", the free open source operating system that today powers many server rooms and data centers all over the world.

As part of the deal, Microsoft vice president Nat Friedman will be appointed CEO of GitHub, while current GitHub CEO and founder Chris Wanstrath will become a Microsoft technical fellow, the company said. Thus GitHub has chose to join up with Microsoft, rather than going public.

Writing on The GitHub Blog, Wanstrath said that he "could have never imagined" news of such a merger, when open source and business were considered as different "as oil and water" a decade ago.

Microsoft is now the most active corporation on GitHub, with more than two million contributions of code to GitHub projects.

It's unclear just how much Microsoft would be paying to acquire GitHub, as its $2 billion valuation actually dates back to 2015. The company expects GitHub to start contributing revenues to its Intelligent Cloud segment on a non-GAAP basis by 2020, roughly one year after the deal closes.

The two have confirmed that Github will operate independently of Microsoft, as an open platform using all programming languages, tools and operating systems for any project. We'll let you know if or when the acquisition becomes official. Potential synergies also exist between GitHub and Microsoft's hybrid cloud platform Azure, as well as LinkedIn.

Meanwhile, GitHub, which celebrated its 10th birthday recently, lost $66m in nine months during 2016 and has been searching for a new CEO for the past nine months.

But despite its popularity with enterprise users, individual developers and open source projects, GitHub has never turned a profit and chances are that the company decided that an acquisition was preferable over trying to IPO.